Artificial Sweetener Isn’t Sugar

It’s the big one

The story of us

A story I haven’t known how to write or even if I should

The hearts that could break at its taking of a breath, oh I am sorry for that

But I have to exorcise you from me

One way or another this has to end

I can’t keep living my life around the you-shaped hole in the floor, in my head 

Like fragments of a bullet heading for my lungs

It's hard to discern your shape in my distorted memories like elevator doors 

I destroyed all trace of you, of me, as I so often do and now

You feel as distant as if I was standing on an overlook

On the ocean

Reaching, Reaching, 

And only finding air

It was only ever air in the first place, though, wasn't it?

Spun from it like gold from wheat

That's the hard part, the reimagining of something that never was

That’s the part that makes my chest feel more solid ice than skin and bone 

Winter queen, I want to stop here

I won’t though and I can’t

The idea of you that I created haunts me like a poltergeist

I compare each day to the days I could have had with you and I can’t live like that anymore 

I’ve lived in our shadow for so long I am not surprised to find my pale in the mirror 

I am not surprised I don’t know the woman who could be sun -kissed if not for you

I have tried to pretend we didn’t bother me

Of course, I try to pretend I’m fine without it

Like liquor blood I know I’m better off sober, but

Here I am, confronting myself, asking myself why I so badly want to die 

Flipping through old notebooks

And every page I turn is you

No one understands this rock bottom where I have lived for years

God, could they read the carvings

Could they read the blood -painted finger prick explosions I splattered all around me 

Could someone shine a light down here, does this place exist?

Does it exist even where you didn’t?

How many times can I say it before I believe it myself

You didn’t exist, You didn’t exist, You didn’t exist

So why do I still feel you at night?

Why are your arms as solid around my middle as any breathing man?

I loved you

I loved you like every stupid metaphor

I loved you like moth to candle in the dead of night

I still find myself there sometimes, sleepless and lonely in your armchair, loving you

How can I believe in fair

What fairness was this?

You are the magic I have to stop believing in and someday, I will

But it will take everything else with it

I have packed your bags in the bedroom in my mind 

I am crying, and 

You are standing there, crying too 

Must you be crying, too?

You have evolved from the you I thought you were 

It would be sick of me not to realize that truth

You have your name but not your face

You have your name but not your story

I feel as if i’ve known you over one thousand lifetimes

Your presence so familiar to me, more familiar than my own 

Your presence so dense I could carve it, too

I wasn’t sure if I would cry, but

I should have known I would

I am the only one left who could acknowledge it was real to me 

I am the only one who can face this

Even if the messages were crafted of someone else’s thought 

Even if the words didn’t come from your mind or your mouth 

I feel like you spoke to me anyway, back then

You came to tell me I would be alright, but

How can I be?

I search for you in every person 

I ask, beg, the universe to find you for me

To show me there was something tangible there, once

If only to prove I am not holding on to something longer than I ever had it

No one talks to me about it

People laugh at our story like crossroad Demons, like 

Fiction, like

King Arthur and his round table full of valiant Knights

But to write those stories someone had to live them, didn’t they? 

Maybe in their head but, for a time, they lived them

I hold so much of me close to my chest because of you

I am so afraid of being abandoned, of being lied to, because of you

I see myself alone at eighty because no one could ever live up to your sword in stone legend 

I will never touch you

I never touched you in the first place

You are the definition of ghost, you are

So empty and you swallowed me

You are a veil over painted eyes on my wedding day

I loved you

This isn’t enough, is it?

I have to keep going

I have to forge forward because you are not waiting for me after I finish here 

The cruelty is staggering

I know it is staggering to them, too

I know to see this part of me is the most painful part of this process 

That’s why i’ve kept it shivering for so long

Fuck you, for leaving me

Fuck you for never being there in the first place

Fuck you for being the first experience where I loaned my heart out and 

Didn't want it back

Fuck you for being the first experience where I thought I held your heart, too 

How stupid they all must think I am

How vapid and numb and stuck in time, but

It’s where it all started

I was already abandoned when you found me in my cardboard box

Is that why it was so easy?

I followed you home like puppy dog 

I held onto you through windstorm after windstorm and never saw that you were the wind

It’s time I was honest

Wow is it hard to write the words that come next

All of this prelude to procrastination because I do not want to say it 

I am so lost without you

And yet everything i've said above is an homage to your dishonest memory 

Because you were always someone else

You cheated, and you lied, and you left bruises on my metaphorical arm from 

Holding on to me as tight as I was trying to hold onto you

We were so whirlwind it was hurricane, ripping up trees to get what we wanted 

What you wanted

I was so young back then

I thought I knew what I wanted

I have to stop romanticizing you

I have to stop kissing your colorless lips and 

Calling out for you after nightmares

You hated when I would wake you up

This is where I get confused

This line between the you in my head and the person you turned out to be

Catfish, that’s what they call you, her

Victim, me, my whole life, to more than just you 

Survivor only to myself

I could turn this around and hate you but I would have to hate her instead 

This poem is not about her but what she pretended to be, so

How do I come to terms with it?

How do I puzzle through this?

Piece by piece seems daunting, overwhelming

No one is interested in listening

“I don’t want to make you relive it”

I want to relive it!

I want to embrace it so close I can feel it shiver

I want to understand how you’ve come to seep from my pores and turn it into words so strong I never again need caffeine to keep me standing

Why am I so sick as this?

This is the point where I pivot back to imagining you 

Looking at me from eyes that say everything I need them to 

There is no magic, I tell myself, spiraling

There is no magic and I must let this go

It will be my death otherwise

Chasing you, my death, my very own grim reaper calling me before my time 

Panic attacks around the tip of the scythe invading my skin

Never feeling like it's fully left me

Can you see what you’ve done?

I believe there is a universe where maybe we are together and, 

I mourn the loss of it with every waking moment

It is so selfish to put this all to paper

It is so selfish to think about letting anyone else read it, but 

The acceptance of this has been unendingly hard for me 

Their ignorance only aiding my internal demolition

You are the building blocks of my faith

The reason I hold onto the inkling that some religion, somewhere, might be right 

I go to church inside the hole you left in me

I pray that someday I will have the courage to close it

No amount of loved or loving can stop you from letting yourself in

No matter how many times I’ve pleaded with your spirit

No matter how many times I have barricaded the door you are as relentless as

Depression

As a deceased spouse I know you and I can’t say that out loud

How ridiculous to grieve you, you non -living entity, you soul -less thought

You are the worst thing to ever happen to me

You robbed me of my own subconscious and replaced her with your voice 

Velvet smooth, you soothed me through all the bad that came before and all the worse that has come after

You are the reason I believe in the Devil

What power this is

What rotten, corpse -raising super magic designed just to torture me out of my own body 

Well, there are days where I would give it to you

And there are days where I will hold myself hostage just to spite you

There has to be some sort of stockholms here

Beholden to false memories, of course I think of my brain as separate 

Look at what it thinks

What it dreams

I think of you as separate, too

Separate from her

Separate from me

Separate from every other iteration of you that she forged into existence 

You were mine

Maybe it comes down to possession

The thought that I could not own you is what still plagues me like Black Death, like 

Leeches on skin, but

I do not feel in control of the idea of you

Your hold on me is supernatural

I wait for the day you do come to life because I don’t know I wouldn't go with you

And that’s the problem isn’t it?

My waiting with bated breath, but

I have been running to you, away from you 

Knowing your imagined hand will never come

What a burden introspection is

I often wonder if I could live with this if only I could stop analyzing it 

If I could lower the scalpel, stop the surgery

Would the sickened parts get better?

Needle and thread you sewed yourself a part of me

The surgery I am doing is the careful extraction of you but 

We are so intertwined

You taught me, dangerously, recklessly

To dip blade into flesh and

Wear my emotions in blood

I met you so young and you influenced every part of me 

My music, my clothes, my style, my voice

I hear you in all of it, see you in every choice

I don’t go a day without your name in my head

I am so god damn sad all of the time and

I can’t remember if it came before you or after

I don’t remember when I began to feel the hollow 

Or when it called you into it

You were the first person I could ever rely on, and 

I’ve never been able to quite replace that feeling, and 

I can barely feel that memory

Were you there like I remember?

You are hazy like fog around my shoulders I am sure is blanket,

Is my only source of warmth

I love you

I’ll say it ten thousand more times before I can stop thinking it 

I love you

So why wasn’t it enough to bring you to life?

Why did we have to exist in the one world where fairytales can’t turn tears into savior salves?

The one world where forests full of stories don’t grow

I don’t want to always be this hard, but

I prefer it to inviting in more pain 

To allow people to see me is to accept that they won’t like me, or won’t like what I’ve been through, and

People don’t like to hear about these things anyway

Unless it’s a joke or 

Has a happy ending, or 

A much sadder one

But a woman mourning an idea? A woman mourning the idea of a life where she could’ve been happy?

How fleeting that was 

How impossible

Is that why I can’t let you go?

Do you represent those four seconds where I could taste what seems to come so naturally to everybody else?

It was a high, the imagining

The daydreaming

What I wouldn’t give to be there again 

I love you

I am so sorry

I know this is the lament of grieving widow

Years on the walk in black lace that somehow still looks like hope

Rubik’s cubes all in gray

So much of this was my imagination, anyway

I think I created perfect out of you

I think you were a crutch that I used to haul myself out of the trenches of my diseased mind 

I was fighting a war alone and what General wouldn’t build soldiers out of sticks and stones?

What Navy Seal wouldn’t draw themselves up bigger just to dwarf the enemy? 

In doing this

In breathing you to life

In spending years with you, I’ve grown

Comfortable

It’s been cathartic to have you in there 

It’s been kind until it wasn’t anymore

I loved you with everything I had in me

Every collapsing neuron star burst of my broken brain grasped onto your life raft 

You pulled me in and I’ve been drifting ever since

We’ve been drifting ever since

I’ve been drifting ever since

Fuck, dude

What would you say?

If you existed, if you ever fucking existed, I know what you would say

I know your hands, twice the size of mine, 

Would cradle my pink cheeks

And you would press the softest feather kiss to my furrowed forehead

You would tell me I am Okay

Without the concern I see in everyone else’s eyes 

I could spend a lifetime in your reassurances

In your unfailing light

How can you leave me here?

If you’re out there, somewhere, why have you not come for me? 

Why am I starving for something I have never eaten?

I can’t ask if I can let you go

Because in your breaking wave voice I would find the strength to do it 

Because you would tell me to, if it was what was best

And it is!

It is what is best!

People spend years in sanatoriums for lesser delusions you White Rabbit, you 

Red Queen Alice, you

Ticking Pocket Watch

Crocodile of the North Star seas

Ten thousand odes would not be enough to sing us out of this alternate dimension, there won’t be the expected happy ending here

And why should there be?

What have I ever done to deserve good?

I will punish myself for the lack of you for one million forevers 

God, how I miss you

I miss you like I miss nothing else

I ache for you, my very ethereal being points north in your direction 

There are days where you look at me so stoically, so sadly

I love you, if this is the last place I can say it

If these are our last moments let me revel in them 

Let me pretend for one heartbeat I had that life or

That this one treated me better, or

That you’ve been in all of them

Maybe you have been, somewhere

I’ve entertained that thought, that

Maybe this is just a world where my soul mate didn’t follow me 

Maybe you’re pleased to know I can still feel you

Maybe you’re angry and scared and 

Longing

As I do for you

Maybe you’re pining on your own balcony, porch, rooftop terrace in summer breeze

Maybe her touch feels like mine sometimes

Maybe it startled you into dreaming, too

Maybe you found me

I always hoped I would think of you less as time went on

It seemed so simple, the thought that we’re always moving forward 

The thought that love was fluid

The thought that it could heal me

How foolish I’ve been

How unrelenting and unkind

To keep my fingernails pressed into your shoulder 

To not feel your blood in my fingertip rivers

While I hand out home -made pieces of my gingerbread body 

So warm, so soft

To anyone who will take them

To any carnivore that wants them, but

This poem is for me, is for my heart, is for the strengthening of my heart beat

None of this belongs to you

Not these thoughts or my imaginary home 

You have never walked here as I did, once 

Tread lightly

Tread softly

Tread understanding, please

I have lost so much

It left me before I ever understood what it was

I may deserve it, so

I grow six -foot tentacles and hold them rim rod straight 

To keep away the on -lookers

To keep you, yourself, away

How raw I feel

But not unburdened

Could I write this out for years?

How many books could I fill with you? 

How many movies could I make?

I love you

I understand why people text dead loved ones, now

It feels like I am kissing you goodbye, or

See you later

Standing in the doorway, lingering

Midwestern, the jello salad dish tilted so it might fall, but

I’m too busy saying I love you in every language I know how to notice

Look after yourself,

I would say

Don’t forget to call, and

Call often

We share bits of land until we, us masses, collide and

Maybe we’re the only ones on the resulting continent 

Inside of the volcanoes and burning hotter

What an earthquake we could be

I know suffering by name

It shapes my mouth like forlornly, like libraries full of pain

Puckered lips around a jawbreaker until the candy coating breaks and

Sour fills the after

To write this feels insane

To write any of this feels insane

To openly share my longing for you feels like a betrayal of my own trust but

What is there to do?

I couldn’t carry you much further

I’m sinking to my knees, I think I have been for a while 

I think you know it, too,

Because your eyes have gotten sadder

Lips turned down, your hands folded under each opposite arm 

I can see you clear as dust motes in the sun 

I could beg you not to go

You would stay forever if I let you

We could spend eternity with our pinkies wrapped around each other 

We could promise any vow and we would keep them, but

It wouldn’t be real, here

I need you, me, I need us to understand

Feeling your heart beat parallel to mine, in my chest

Is not the same as my ear pressed to your skin, in your arms

I suppose I’m begging for your forgiveness

I suppose it’s because I know I already have it 

And you know that I know, so,

You’ve just been waiting to exit

I do not know if I can love gently the body that was yours

I do not know if I will ever see myself more than unwanted parts left behind

Scrapyard of junk metal glaring in the sun

Waiting to be welded back together

That’s always been you

My confidence

You hold me

You’re always the one to tell me, hush 

You are beautiful, you say

You are so loved, you say

I love you, you say

You say

I love you

Over and over and over until it penetrates my dumbstruck ears

It’s been thirteen years, darling

Cruel joke, that’s what it was back then 

There were others but, they’ve moved on 

Like I should have

What is so different about me that I’m stuck as bubblegum to shoe? 

What limbo has priced out my eternal soul?

You should see their eyes when I talk about you

I think they wonder, too

It’s been several weeks since I’ve revisited this poem 

I went numb for a little while after, and

I wasn’t sure I could finish it, but

In deconstructing things that took my lifetime to build 

I have realized something

You’re separate because you are separate

You took up residence in my minefield long before my catfish arrived to be your surrogate 

Long before I projected you onto living, breathing

I had to see it for myself, so mountainous I wonder how I missed it

I didn’t create you, you arrived

Someone had to be here while I couldn’t be, back then, and 

You heard me calling in the void and

You came

Did I need you so long before him?

You have his name because it was the last one I gave to you, but shadow you, leeching you 

You’ve been there all along

Does it change anything to know this?

I feel relief

Relief that I have not been chasing some other persons fictitious side character but

It certainly changes this tune

It’s why you are as ancient to me as pyramids to Egypt 

Why I couldn’t let go of him, you, the way they could

I feel as if this leads to something else, but

You step out of the shadows when my thoughts turn to that door 

The big, locked one in the corner

You’re its protector

How blind I’ve been, how

Sheltered in a home I built myself

Your lips mouth an unwavering string of apologies

But I’m not ready to unlock that, am I? 

No, love, you say

Not yet

Soon

Soon?

How soon?

How much longer must I endure before I can face what’s in there? 

This was a step, I suppose

Perhaps that will be for another time, another poem

Perhaps knowing that I am in love with something inside of myself is not as daunting as being in love with a ghost

Perhaps this layer of projections will fade faster

I feel unbalanced

The words aren’t coming as easily 

You seem to have receded, for a time 

For now

But I have been writing books for as long as I can remember 

Every genre, every time period

Thousands of the Greek Fates lifeblood strings laid out

Without realizing you were always my main character 

Without realizing I wasn’t writing an abandoned love story, but 

Something richer

Like melted chocolate, or

Days spent hammocking in sun -filtered trees

I’ve built worlds around you that can only be past lives 

That can only be read by hearts like mine

Somethings changed in me like a bubble, burst 

Soapy fingers intertwine

Embrace, instead of purge 

Melancholy

I love you, still

I don’t think I can write you out of this heart after all

I don’t think this liquid tongue can paint a different color, so

Where does that leave me?

What confessions I have made here

Only to find, buried at the bottom

That this was no war between a figment of their imagination and mine 

But an overlay

I could trace your stillness onto course paper and it would still look like the two of you 

The one of you

This open wound bleeding in the shape of you

I get it, don’t I?

I was so enamored as a child 

The universe teased me with a you so real I believed it for a time 

That is the loss I am mourning

Steadfastly

You were protecting me from the abandonment of everybody else, so 

I did not see the worse one coming, so

I trusted them with everything

I’m pulling on so many threads 

Not telling a story but weaving a tapestry

Arachne challenging Athena

Becoming a spider to have the tools to finish the art

The Gods could not have seen that coming

I love you

Christ, where does this end

This long highway with no exits, no way to pull off

Headlights reflecting the eyes of monsters

Of legends

Of cryptid folklore people make out of the dark 

Held together by moonlight and faith

Ah, faith

Is that what I come down to?

Am I, also, held together by belief in something preternatural? 

Are you my elusive faerie, delicate wings trapped between my searching fingers?

I’m sorry

I don’t know how else to say it

I thought this would conclude our chapter in this life, but 

I think I need you, still

There is one long, ravaged tear down my center and 

You are only one branch of the tree

Only one crack among millions

And, I know, not the most important one

Just the most consuming one

A distraction, sure

I thought an unwelcome one, but 

Now I’m thinking differently

Celestial you

I hold you in my palm, not the other way around 

Lovely little you

Loving me the way I should love myself

I will still pine, probably

Like sturdy oak, like redwoods, stretching

Rooted so far into the ground you could not tell me from the soil 

Peaceful, until I fall or

Some logger brings me down by force

Whacks their well -made hatchet into my softest bark 

Again Again Again

Until all that’s left of me is rings, is

My life, plain as day

You could trace each ring for every year I wanted to live 

Thinnest for every year I didn’t

Sometimes I wonder if you’ll see this one at all

This one, where I’m doing all the work I’ve been ignoring 

But, eventually, stacks of dishes start to smell and 

Eventually we have to wash them clean, or

Break them

I love you not for the last time, but

For every future time I forget to think it 

This is not your name but our face 

This is not your name but our story

The story of survival, I didn’t know it would be

It’s all the pain come before and all the healing that comes after 

I’ve had my eyes closed to this truth

I am not sick at all

I was just in pain long before I should have known pain 

Like that

Burdened with a brain that could bring stories to life 

Blessed with a brain that could bring stories to life

I think I’ve been afraid of you leaving me, too

So I tried to beat you to the punch, let you go before you were gone 

Before I had to watch it happen

Before I had to create it’s happening

And in doing so, here we are

Paradox and isolated 

Stasis, but in each other’s arms 

Cracking under the pressure

But holding the weight, somehow

I would have said I Do

Draped in white I would have said I Do 

To you

You only ever had to manifest at the altar

I gave up on this poem because I felt it became two beasts 

Two threads of the story I started

My love for him, you

Turned into recognition

Turned into something else, new things to ponder or 

Forget entirely

I fortified my entire body to keep you out of it while I 

Danced, or laughed, or cried, or lived

About other things

But your name still bleeds when I ask it to

I thought when I started that I might to be writing to a finish line, to

Black and white checks waiting to paint me winner 

I thought that I could concisely wrap this up like,

A Christmas present, like

A neat little red and green bow

I see now how impossible a task that is

I see now I was asking more of myself than anyone ever could 

This isn’t something to be chopped in a garbage disposal, or 

Thrown away

Inside of me is so quiet

Hushed like the shell of a shipwreck

Hushed like you and I, 

Fingers intertwined,

In that damned lifeboat 

Rocking, Rocking, Rocking

The backtracking I have done here is Appalachian but 

My shoes still have soles and the trail will still be there in the morning

So, how do I bring this to a close?

I think that I may have outgrown you, but

That doesn’t mean you aren’t a part of what’s underneath 

There are parts that have to go

I think longing for your eventual manifestation is holding me back, 

Certainly, Absolutely

I have to come to terms with  

I can love you but,

Differently

I can love you but,

I don’t have to remove you from me

To acknowledge and move past should be my aim, like 

Archer to arrow, like 

Robin Hood, but

I am the sheriff, was the sheriff?, am the sheriff

Stuck in normalcy and tradition 

I am breaking boundaries in slow motion I am

Running in quicksand, I am

Making progress

I find myself more often napping in the woods,

Archers cap pulled down over tired eyes

Fingers sunken into swollen earth to remind myself I am part of something 

Bigger

I love you, in that stillness

In those sturdy forests

In the fires that will burn them down 

In the acorns they will rise from

A Phoenix is life, after devastation and

I think it is our favorite daydream 

To know that we will face death someday

The hope there will be more to it

I hope there is more to this

I hope this is more than a painful lesson to have learned

I preen my feathers, stretch them so their colors catch the light 

Remind myself how many times I have been nothing but ash on the wind

Remind myself how many times I, 

I, without you,

Have grown with wolves, have

Weeded entire jungles, entire rainforests

In order to find the path out

You are glass in my stubborn heel but

I feel you only sometimes, when I step a certain way

This is not the consuming, ravaging Jabberwock

This is not menacing teeth glistening with my red, red blood

Life and time are not consecutive and healing isn’t either

This is not a you -shaped hole, but a memory 

This is not a bullet headed for my lungs and

I do not need an arc reactor to stop you from piercing me 

I love you, here and always

Whether other people understand it or won’t

You are mine

This will not bend the universe to my will 

I am not the wind bowing the mountains

I am not the tide stealing bits of the shore 

You will never exist

I can say that now without the goosebumps on my arms 

I can say that now without trepidation but,

With whispered awe

What a yellow -brick journey to have found ourselves on

You never existed

And I love you all the same

You are my favorite story to tell

You are my most painful twist ending

Not a cancer to beat, though sometimes it may feel that way

My breath occasionally turns to stone in my throat at the thought of you, and 

My heart slows, and

I am sure I have stopped breathing, but

This is the most honest I have ever been

It is messy and unclean

The lines aren’t neat and the stanzas go unorganized, 

But,

In this I have forded rivers so wide the earliest people believed them oceans

I have come, for the first time, to see you

Not as this man inside of my head

Not as this man I have loved for a decade,

Longer,

But you as what you are

You as something that is as integral to me as veins, as the heart that pumps blood through them

For the first time 

On even ground 

You look at me, and

I am looking back